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Home › Articles › Development › Sensory Play for Toddlers

Sensory Play for Toddlers

Part Two: Developing the Sense of Hearing

By Laura Cone

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Brain research shows children gravitate toward rhyming words before non-rhyming words, says Trelease. "Your hearing gravitates to patterns and the patterns in the language," he says. "If you listen to children lying in the crib when they are learning to speak, it's like one little poet lying in bed. 'Bah bah bah bah,' and they are repeating words over and over."

Karen Claugherty of Tampa, Fla., a center director and instructor for Music Together in the Tampa area, says children learn rhythm and rhyme in her program for infants and toddlers. Her son, Kearns, 6, participated when he was a toddler. He was more apt to walk around twirling the instruments rather than playing them, but Claugherty says it's fine to let children experience music at their own pace.

"We start with singing 'hello' and we bring out egg shakers or sticks," Claugherty says. "Those are designed to bring out the rhythm in the music. We have large movement and small movement to help the body come into it and use rhythm. We do a lot of vocal play with our voices. We do a lot of animal sounds."

Claugherty says every child has a different learning style. Some children are more auditory while others are visual.

Children with hearing problems often benefit from the wide variety of music. "I had a mother with two children, a 5- and 7-year-old who both had auditory problems," she says. "I found the repetition and the tonal play we do helped them develop. The repetition of the songs at class and at home helps them. It's a very rich sound of music."

She says the point is to give children the opportunity to be a producer, not a consumer of music. "You can use anything you can make a noise with," Claugherty says. "You can make instruments or you can buy instruments."

Finally, when it comes to helping toddlers develop their sense of hearing at home, let them use their voices and bodies as their instruments. You may feel silly making animal sounds or singing ditties to your child in the car, but your toddler will grow up to appreciate tonal sounds, chords and all the richness of music and language.

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